One in 44 Internet Users Damaged by Internet Fraud

Finally someone is ready to combat those endless winning notifications that we all get in dozens in our email inboxes (most often sorted out as spam with some still pretending to be valid emails). For quite a while I myself hoped that at least one of these notification of yet another million dollars I win in a lottery organized by Yahoo Mail (most often) or some other organization will actually be real but now that I know I should not even hope to win anything in a lottery based on one of my numerous free email accounts, I do believe there must be companies working to help other people stop hoping and falling for the fraudulent schemes as well.

So absolutely appropriately today Microsoft, Yahoo!, Western Union, and African Development Bank announce a coalition destined to fight internet lottery scams. It is well known that well-known brands are often used by fraudsters in their emails where people are invited to send some money (often by Western Union) to make sure the prize arrives to the lucky winner so no surprises these companies have decided to join forces to stop fraudsters from damaging their brands.

The major idea for the coalition is first of all to raise awareness of internet users that such lotteries are nothing but frauds and should never be trusted. Awareness definitely needs to be increased as one out of 44 internet users in 7 European countries where people took part in the survey has lost money in an internet scam of this or that type over the last year. Individual losses ranged from less than 100 euro to more than 7,000 euro.

The most dangerous trend is that the number of various fraudulent activities usually increase as people grow more and more damaged by economic meltdown. It is well known that get-rich-quick scams get wider spread as the overall economic environment gets worse. So we should expect more and more such emails landing in our inboxes now that the economic downturn is affecting more people who will be more likely to  fall victims to such scams unless they know how to react.

It is also worth noting that various internet scams where people lose their money negatively affect the overall image of the internet with 51% of people interrogated in the survey told that they were reluctant to buy products online because of the frauds. And of course it is in our best interests to make sure online trade does not suffer even more now that every single dollar generated in revenues matters for the internet industry overall.

All the four companies will work together to research and help law enforcement authorities to prevent various internet scams internet users are exposed to. And of course the goal of educating users of such possibilities seems to be a wise one as you can only be protected from cybercrime if you know it exists and know how to handle it. Hopefully in a year the members of the coalition will publish the results of a new research and we will see some real results, including less people losing their money in internet scams.

Image by d70focus used under Creative Commons.